Voices and Visions: The Grand and Passionate Madness of Ministry
Texts for Reflection: 1 Samuel 3:1-10; Mark 1:16-20; Revelation 1:1-3, 9-11; 2:1, 8, 12, 18; 3:1, 7, 14; 10:8-11.
I can never remember a time I didn’t want to be a minister. I can never forget the times I have wanted to leave the ministry.
My fellow ministers, my fellow pastors, my fellow companions, my fellow pilgrims and sojourners: after our long exile we have come home. But it is not home (which is the subject of our next lecture). Remembering and never forgetting is both our joy and our pain. And this is what we are here to talk about over the next several days. This will be the burden of our round table conversation about celebrating, claiming and clarifying our calling. Or, as Charles Kingsley, the Anglican clergyman and novelist put it so long ago, as he would lean over his pulpit in the village church of Eversly in Hampshire, to address his community of faith: “Here we are again to talk about what is really going on in your soul and in mine.”
I can never remember a time I didn’t want to be a minister. I can never forget the times I have wanted to leave the ministry. I speak of my moral failures. I speak of my failure of courage. I speak of my depressions and my discouragement and my despair. I speak of my woundedness in ministry. And I echo in light of all this the words of Martin Luther: “One becomes a theologian by living, by dying, and by being damned, not by understanding, reading, and speculation.”
On a more mundane but nonetheless real level, the level at which most of us engage our daily pastoral rounds, I offer two instances of wanting to leave the ministry.
It was six o’clock on a hot summer evening. My wife had taken our three children to their music lessons. I was hungry and I had just finished cooking two of those boxed turkey pot pies...you know the ones, full of leftover turkey parts, moths’ wings, and rats’ tails...they were steaming hot and just as I was about to eat the phone rang. A parishioner was dying in the hospital...could I come immediately. Of course. But first, the pot pies. I wolfed them down...too hot, too steamy, too sticky and slimy at the same time. Run off to the car. Drive to the hospital. Trot to the entrance. Swept up to the eighth floor to a private intensive care unit. Out of breath, I enter the darkness. The vague image of the patient lying in bed attached to a dozen instruments, tubes protruding from every orifice of the body. I took the patient’s hand, leaned over close to the patient’s face to speak, and received the full projectile of blood and vomitus. At which point, the turkey pot pies decide they need somewhere else to go. I wanted to leave the ministry.
Another time, I am asked to call on some disgruntled parishioners...mainly disgruntled with life, but I have become the object of their dissatisfaction. Summoning all my courage, I bounce up on their porch with energy, bravery and boldness. I ring the doorbell and then notice I am sinking into a freshly poured concrete porch. No where to hide, but I wanted to leave the ministry!
Why have I stayed these 40 years? In the words of Will Campbell, “Because when I accepted the call, I didn’t realize it was collect!”
And so to our topic for this hour: Voices and Visions: The Grand and Passionate Madness of Ministry.
Samuel tells us, “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” Nor in our day. And indeed a rarity for sacredness and integrity in any kind of “word” in our day–religious, economic or political. In Samuel’s day, if you heard God speaking to you, if you had visions, you might be called a prophet. Today we have pills for that kind of thing! Or, in our day, if you do hear God speaking to you, if you have visions, and if you don‘t take your pills, you are more likely to be called a schizophrenic.
Interesting. In one case, designated a prophet. In another case, diagnosed a schizophrenic. Or in a case a whole people and a whole nation remember, when a young black preacher had a dream, and gave word to that dream with integrity, authenticity and passion–singled out as a subversive and shot. Shot! Because he dreamed. Because he provoked dreams. Because he gave expression to dreams. Because of the utter madness–and subversive power–and erotic passion of a dreamed word that impregnates a whole movement –shot dead on the balcony of the Loraine Hotel in Memphis. Dreaming and impregnating with words is a dangerous business.
We, of course, have been called to ministry by another dreamer. Jesus of Nazareth. To some designated a prophet and more, to others diagnosed as demon possessed, and still to others a subversive. But in matters of the confession of our faith, primarily a Word–a word made flesh, an incarnate word, an earthly and earthy word.
Is it any wonder the tradition of the church has maintained its practice of ordaining us to be Ministers of Word and Sacrament. Word, dreams, epiphanies, mysteries. It is a calling many of us have sidestepped for more practical and pragmatic work, less mad and mostly less passionate. We have been vomited on too many times. We’ve sunk too deeply into the un-set cement of sinking cultural foundations. We want a place to stand.
What we are here to talk about, however, is the madness of ministry within the very local, very human church, where the mess and the mystery, the message and the meal, the voice and the vision come together in search of making meaning, creating community, connecting coalitions, and claiming and celebrating life–the life of the spirit, the life of companionship, the life of justice, and the life of wisdom–within the vision of the dreamer who called us to this ministry. There are mainly two primary presuppositions that undergird this lecture for opening your five year adventure together in “Transforming Covenants: A Pastoral Excellence Project.”
The first is the point I was making in Desert Hearts and Healing Fountains. I believe we are in a time of great vocational confusion as ministers of word and sacrament. There are, of course, many forms of ministry. But our ordination vows bind us to being ministers of word and sacrament. To being thinking theologians and practicing sacramentalists. To being word people and singers of worlds into being. To the work of imagination and mediation and meaning making.
Forty years ago the great Joseph Sittler spoke of vocational guilt. Twenty years ago many of us suffered vocational defeat. But I believe this is a time of vocational confusion in which we have lost our way. We have become unfocused because we have failed to say “no” to many good and worthy calls but in so doing have lost our ability and desire and passion to say “yes” to the one call of our ordination, the “one thing needful” in Luke’s gospel and the “willing of one thing” which is “purity of heart” in Kierkegaardian thought. It is a vicious circle. We are confused because the church is confused today. And the church is confused because we are confused. To put it bluntly, we have lost faith in the word and the vocation of the word to dream dreams and create worlds. We have opted for direct action and direct action--without thinking, reflecting, interpreting, texting, story telling, ritualizing, sacramentalizing, and the recognition that the renewal of our humanity depends upon a renewal of our language--is simply idiocy. We are, and our congregations are, left in the grip of the tyranny of thoughtlessness. If the Latin tag line from the earliest centuries of the church is true–lex orandi, lex credendi (the way you pray determines what you believe, and vise versa)–then abandonment of the word and the ritualizing of the word by the church’s ministers of word and sacrament, will affect the entirety of the church’s life–its spiritual life, its liturgical life, its communal life and its compassionate outreach and social action life. In T.S. Eliot’s words:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of Speech, but not of Silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.(“Choruses from the Rock”)
T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1971), p. 96.
Without the Word, there is no transformation. Without the Word, there are no covenants. Without the Word, there is no project in pastoral excellence. My other presupposition is rather playful, but nonetheless serious for that. It is that for those of us who have responded to the call of ministry, to the vocation of word and sacrament, to “voices and visions,” we are involved in a bit of madness. The vocation is a bit mad, and the church within which we live this vocation is a bit mad.
It really is a bit mad to spend one’s life listening for God, praying to God, arguing with God for the sake of your people, waiting for God, enduring the silence of God, speaking of God, and trying night and day to hold the world open for the possibility of God. For the sake of our integrity, we need to know this vocation is tiring, frustrating, and fantastic and marvelous work. But it is not very glamorous and it is really not very practical.
Remember St. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine and his discussion of the two orders–uti and frui. Uti is the practical order where things get done. Uti is about utility–things that work and things that have pragmatic value. Frui is the order of the totally useless. Frui is words, and prayers, and sunsets, and Gregorian chants, Maren Tirabassi’s poetry. I suggest that frui is the mad world of pastoral ministry, the ministry of word and sacrament where flesh is bread and bread is body and body is church, and death is life. It is the order of fruit–sort of like a big, beautiful, juicy, succulent, ripe, purple grape. What can you do with a grape but “taste and see.”
But that is what it is to be called to be a minister of word and sacrament within the congregation. “Taste and see” is the invitation of the Psalmist. “Write the words and read the words” is the command and promise in the mad dream of the Apocalypse of St. John. And so it is “The Word” that is sent, in the Revelation, to the seven churches. Listen to this madness:
“The words of the one who holds the seven stars.”
“The words of the first and the last who died and came to life.”
“The words of the one who has the two edged sword that cuts and heals
at the same time.”
“The words of the son of God who has eyes like a flame of fire.”
“The words of the one who has the seven spirits of God.”
(This is an interesting image for our pluralistic world–the
seven spirts of God.)
“The words of the holy one, the true one, who has
the key and opens and no one can shut and shuts
and no one can open.”
“The words of the Amen, the faithful and
true witness, the beginning of God’s
creation.”
“Taste and see.” Write the words. Read the words. Indeed (in chapter 10) “EAT THE SCROLL, SWEET TO THE MOUTH AND BITTER IN THE BELLY.”
The grace and judgment of God...and that’s about all we have to offer as ministers of word and sacrament. It’s all there in the Prophets and the Psalms and the Gospels, and the Apocalypse. And it’s all quite mad. It is all quite frui!
And all of this takes place in a rather mad context called the church. Let Carlo Carretto, a mad Latin American dreamer say it for me for he says it so well: “How baffling you are, oh church, and yet how I love you! How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you! I should like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence. You have given me so much scandal, yet you have made me understand sanctity. I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms. No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, although not completely.”
Have you ever felt this way? Or perhaps you have felt about the church as Fred Craddock has expressed it: “It can kill you and heal you on the same day.”
Why do we want to be involved in this madness? I suppose if we could keep from it, we probably should. The only reason I can give for my involvement is because of this thing called “call”–vocation. Because somewhere back there you and I ate bread and found cum panis–with bread we found companionship (companionship literally means “with bread”). We found relationship and a love that will not let us go. We need to be reminded of that. Because somewhere back there we ate “the scroll” and you can’t quite forget the sweetness in the mouth nor get rid of the ache in the belly. Because somehow we have each dreamed dreams and seen visions–perhaps in city scapes or ghetto streets, perhaps in expansive plains or rolling farmlands, perhaps in foreign rice paddies or isolated hospital wards, perhaps through eyes of haunted and heartbreaking grief or through eyes of irrepressible joy and passion, perhaps watching the evening news or attending a quiet Sunday morning simple country church service. But we’ve seen and tasted, and life can never be the same again. Or perhaps we have heard the call in the voice in the night–the voice of a wounded past, or the voice of shame, or the voice of regret, or the voice of friendship, or idealism, or conscience, or longing. But somehow the cacophony of voices, the kaleidoscope of dreams, and the lingering aftertaste on the tongue of judgment and grace, the will of God, the call of God, the whisper of God has been discerned.
And it usually happens in community. That is why we are here. That is why the concepts of “a holy ministry” and “transforming covenants” and “the mutuality of care” are so important. Old Eli could not hear the voice of God but could discern it. Young Samuel could hear the voice of God but could not discern it. We so desperately need each other.
So...if Wittgenstein was right, that the “limits of our language determine the limits of our world,” then the ministry of word and sacrament is about the birth of new worlds beyond the worlds that do not make room for life or faith or love or justice. This ministry is about the world of our dreams, the world for which our hearts ache and our spirits long. Is not the grand and passionate madness of being ministers of word and sacrament in the church and beyond about:
Provoking dreams.
Bringing about dreams.
Helping people dream.
Or as my five year old grand daughter once said during a sleepless
night, “I’m trying to get the right dream to come!”
If ours is the ministry of the word–then what is “the word.” There is only one theological question left for me in this 7th decade of my ever-shortening life and during this 40th year of my ordination to the Christian ministry of word and sacrament:
WHAT IS THE WORD THAT IMPREGNATES THE VIRGIN?
WHAT IS THE WORD THAT RAISES THE DEAD?WHAT IS THE WORD THAT BRINGS LIFE?
I pray for your collegiality in ministry. May you find, in the five year journey of this project, the grace to make believe, to make love, and to create hope.
The Rev. Dr. Victor L. Hunter is pastor of Evergreen Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Evergreen. Colo., and delivered this sermon in March 2004 at “Celebrating, Claiming, and Clarifying Our Calling,” an event launching “Transforming Covenants,” a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence project of Nebraska Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ. The sermon is copyright by Rev. Hunter and reprinted with his permission. He is the author ofDesert Hearts and Living Foundations: Recovering Pastoral Vocational Clarity, St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2003.
